David enjoys programming computers and building robots. He plays guitar, clarinet, and piano and serves on his school's honor council. David would love to find a career that involved building robots, which fascinate him. His science hero is Bill Nye, the Science Guy. "His demonstrations were exciting and included familiar objects," David explains.
David became fascinated with resonant frequency after watching the famous 1940 video of the Takoma Narrows bridge twisting apart. He originally wanted to find the frequency and intensity of sound that was sufficient to break a wine glass. David began exploring that idea with an experiment in which he tested how the resonant frequency of the glass changed depending on the liquid inside.
David generated tones of various frequencies with a laptop computer and a guitar amplifier. He placed a wine glass near a decibel meter hooked to an oscilloscope, which would measure the frequency generated. He placed a piece of paper on top of the glass, and then filled the glass with, in turn, alcohol, cooking oil, water, syrup, and molasses. He ran a series of trials with various frequencies and recorded the frequency at which the paper vibrated most vigorously—the glass's resonant frequency. He found that denser liquids lowered the resonant frequency.
